. J THE \ A . -= :: . ;e::ív' . . . :: ... = , I" \' .- - II ... .. /: ., . .... ØI' :: ...:: nu il'\\\\ ò · ..,,, ; 0 0 .,..,. . THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment M EMO TO THE RIGHT HONOUR- ABLE WINSTON CHURCHILL, WHO HAS JUST ANNOUNCED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS THAT HE BELIEVES SCOTCH WHISKEY Is BEING SOLD Too CHEAPLY TO THE UNITED STATES: Two guineas or bet- ter for a decent brand in N ew York . now, SIr. S TEAM FROM A BUBBLING CALDRON: The park superintendent of Long Beach, California, resigned because the city auditor wouldn't let him plant yel- / low pansies in front of the city hall. Ernst Krenek wrote an a cappella chorus using as his text the names of stops on the Santa Fe line between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. The University of Naples was closed aft- er a group of students who had failed in their examinations beat the hell out of their professor. When the Navy ex- pedition got down to the Antarctic, it discovered that it had forgotten its two hundred and seventy pairs of skis. }\ Montana Indian chief announced that he was in the marke for a job lot of magpie feathers for war bonnets. A Providence man invented a pillowcase flap to protect bald heads from drafts; a Chicago man invented an alarm clock that lulls people to sleep with soft chillies; and a California man, finding his electric clock running backward, switched the numerals so he could read it with a mirror. A higamist in Atlanta told the court that if the state could have two governors, he could haye two wives. A BrItish railway ap- pealed to the public to return three hundred thousand towels, taken since 1939, and got two. A Columbia zoolo- gist, presented with a live European fruit fly by a British colleague, told the press he was as thrilled as a young girl re- ceiving her first box of candy; a rela- tivity physicist, who is extending the Einstein Theory to take in electromag- netics, announced, "I shall look an awful fool if I am wrong;" and a poll re- vealed that more people could identif) pictures of Elsie the Cow than could iden tify pictures of Einstein Isadora Duncan's brother put on a one-man play, entitled "My Life Storv," in Town Hall, in which he played himself raising goats in Greece and also played all the goats. When a convict in Alcatraz who had signed up for correspondence-course English les- sons wrote on the first assignment that he was studying English in order to write a book exposing Alcatraz, the prison officials confiscated his lessons. The finder of a pair of lost eyeglasses in Cincinnati telephoned the loser not to bother advertising any more; she was keeping them. A collapsible dagger failed to collapse at a Paris opera per- formance, putting the baritone in the hospital, and the Macduff in a British repertory performance of "Macbeth" "laid on" with such gusto that Mac- beth also ended up in a hospital. The general secretary of the American Den- tal Association told a convention that the country has a backlog of about four cavities per capita; a St. Louis dentist announced that tooth decay is caused by emotional disturbances; and a damage suit in Rhode Island hinged on whether twenty-three teeth could be extracted without a man's knowledge. The me- chanical rabbit at an English dog track refused to stop at the end of a race and took the dogs around for a second turn; the fa vorite won both times. A Canadian woman who has been prac- ticing flying by putting on a pair of homemade wings and jumping off huild- ings has got her altitude up to twenty- fi ve feet. ^ S we looked over the collection ot elegant and lacy valentines cur- rently on exhibition at the Museum of . e ' r - æ f '" it m '.' ' ::';. .'4: t"" > c: c- '" the City of New York, we reflected that although for countless generations now the human race has been unstrung by the ease and frequency with which it falls in love, or pretends to do so, it per- sists in dealing with the problem in a shamefully haphazard way-treating it sometimes with levity, sometimes with despair, and sometimes, when the pangs of unrequited passion are particularly fierce, with vulgar disrespect, but al- ways gingerly, as if it might go off in one's face, like a defective Roman can- dle. This procedure, to whIch ever) red-and-gold valentine at the Museum bears witness, compares unfavorably with, say, our study of the properties of atoms or of the sexual activities of earth- worms. The confusion that centers on the whole benign subject of love and lovers is so great, in fact, that no modern authority dares say for sure why we have a Saint Valentine's Day, admitting only that it is older than flowers-by-wire and Whitman's chocolates, and may be counted on to endure. Webster, always cold-blooded, asserts that Saint Valen- tine himself had nothing to do with the custom of sending love tokens on Feb- ruary 14th and adds gratuitously that it IS the day on which, according to legend, birds begin to mate-a state- ment as peripheral as the one in the Britannica to the effect that there were no less than three Saint Valentines and that none of them can be said to have